John Riley, 38, of Riverview, Fl. pictured in front of his flooded home on Tuesday, August 6, 2024. Riley had to evacuate his home Monday evening as waters from Bullfrog Creek began to seep into his home, caused by Hurricane Debby. [Photo by Dylan Townsend/Tampa Bay Times via ZUMA Press Wire]
Nearly a year ago, Linda Wicker found her waterfront restaurant covered in 6 feet of mud and marsh grass after Hurricane Idalia slammed into Taylor County.
The Category 4 storm required four months of cleanup and repairs to reopen Roy’s Restaurant along the Steinhatchee River.
Last Tuesday, Wicker said she was “blessed” after Hurricane Debby brought rain but didn’t cause nearly as much damage as Idalia.
“As things turned out, we are so thankful that there’s no damage,” Wicker said. “We’ve just had some very loyal customers over the years, friends, family, and we are going to be really happy to welcome everybody back.”
Debby made landfall Monday morning near Steinhatchee as a Category 1 hurricane with maximum sustained winds of 80 mph. Last August, rural Taylor County took the brunt of Idalia, which made landfall in Keaton Beach.
Debby moved across North Florida and into Georgia, dumping heavy rain. It moved back into the Atlantic, made landfall again in South Carolina, spun off deadly tornadoes as it moved through North Carolina, and was well into Virginia by Friday morning. It is expected to inundate New England over the weekend.
Taylor County Sheriff Wayne Padgett said Tuesday the priority was getting electricity back on in the region.
“The biggest issue right now is power, getting power back up, getting people back home and situated and in the air conditioning where they can cool off,” Padgett said.
At its peak, Debby caused more than 600,000 power outages in Florida, according to PowerOutage.us.
The Florida Municipal Electric Association said Tuesday afternoon it had restored power to virtually all of its 80,000 municipal utility customers who had outages.
While the state started recovery efforts, Gov. Ron DeSantis described Idalia and Debby as “night and day.”
“With Idalia there was debris everywhere,” DeSantis said during an appearance at Roy’s.
“This is a very heavily wooded area. … There (were) trees down. There were things all over the roads. It was a lot, particularly in places like Taylor and Dixie County,” DeSantis said. “As you get into North Central Florida, what I’ve seen (from Debby) has not even come close to that. And you wouldn’t expect that. Idalia was just a hair under a Category 4 hurricane. It was a major hurricane. And it didn’t leave the same amount of water that we’ve seen in other parts of the state, but it did pack a really significant punch. And so, ultimately, that’s a good thing.”
But while Debby wasn’t as destructive as Idalia, DeSantis said that doesn’t lessen the impact on people who have gone through both.
“To then have another storm come through as you’re still picking up the pieces, even if it wasn’t as powerful, it’s almost like salt in the wound,” DeSantis said.
At least five deaths in Florida have been attributed to Debby: two in Dixie County, one in Hillsborough County, one in Pinellas County and one in Levy County, where a teen died after a tree crashed through the roof of a mobile home.
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